Popinator: The mouth-seeking popcorn cannon

You know you're living in the future when even the simple act of throwing a piece of popcorn in the air and catching it in your mouth gets a mechanical upgrade. Thanks to snack maker, Popcorn Indiana, eating popcorn is now as "easy" as asking for it and having the company's new Popinator fire a piece right into your mouth.

The Popinator was designed to make eating popcorn more fun and as a way to munch while keeping your hands free. It uses a binaural microphone system – similar to the way humans hear – to detect when the word "pop" is spoken and pinpoint where the sound came from. Then it flips up a small barrel and launches a piece of popcorn in the air for the person to catch in their mouth. Each piece of popcorn has a different size and shape though, so it might take a little maneuvering to snatch out of the air, but it still looks remarkably accurate.

Popcorn Indiana employees have been enjoying the Popinator in meetings and break rooms around their office, where they're presumably hit by friendly fire every time someone mentions the company's product. Sadly, the company has not revealed any plans to bring the device to consumers, so we'll have to stick with tossing popcorn into our mouths the old-fashioned way for now. The company does also produces a chip made from popcorn, called "Chip'ins," though, so maybe we'll see a machine in the future that flings chips across the room like tiny, triangle-shaped Frisbees.

Jonathan grew up in Norway, China, and Trinidad before graduating film school and becoming an online writer covering green technology, history and design, as well as contributing to video game news sites like Filefront and 1Up. He currently resides in Texas, where his passions include video games, comics, and boring people who don't want to talk about either of those things. All articles by Jonathan FincherFollow @jonathanfincher